‘Perpetual abuse of the human dignity is repugnant and blasphemous and no man can endure it for a long time..’
Volgin I. The road is long whenever you go. Literary essays.
‘No, you can’t live that way. You have to commit suicide’
M. Zoshenko
I.
http://www.opednews.com/populum/diarypage.php?did=406
A recent statement by Rob Kall about suicide bombing being immoral, period, got me thinking. In the Y2005 I wrote a rebuttal to the Ward Churchill’s opinion (see the link above) proving him wrong in his perceptions that the victims of the 9/11 somehow ‘got it coming’ and deserved their fate. I wrote then that there was no message in the murder- suicide- only murder. I still stand on it in principle. But I learned something through these years and I have to modify my perception; yes, there is a message in murder- suicide and a very clear one. It is a message of desperation. As we all are human and all are capable of desperation we all are thus on equal grounds when it comes to it. And that’s what the second component of the message is- it is profoundly equal, the statement of the human control over the final solution, the personification of the self- sacrifice as a human- to – human message beyond the technology and beyond the walls we erect between each other so that we do not see what we want not to see. Murder- suicide is the last resort of the desperate, the explosion of the concentrated hate, sort of crypto-madness the only purpose of which is to remind to all of us that everyone dies alone and that none of us is invincible. Desperation is an omnipotent force.
History reveals numerous examples of the people sacrificing themselves individually or en masse, also giving up their own children for what they considered a worthy cause. It goes back to the ancient times. Roman, and after them the Christian historians reveal to us a story about consul Brutus who ordered a public execution of both his young sons when they were accused of the plot against the emerging Republic. We now would call that rightfully bizarre. But Romans considered Brutus as an ultimate hero. Children’s Crusades were nothing but a political ploy of the papacy but they turned out as very efficient force to stir the Catholic fanatics for the real Crusades. Medieval Chronicles tell us about the people of Leiden, Holland who when besieged by the Spaniards opened the dams so that the sea flowed in and drowned them and the Spanish alike. That act of unbelievable desperation is still highly regarded as a feat of the common spirit.
We consider the 19th Century as the one of the enlightenment in the area of the universal human morality. But it was exactly in then when the human martyrdom rose to a new level- the level of the ideological significance.
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